Lance Hood:               Richard can you tell everyone your story and about how you got started in buying businesses, and how you went from there to where you are today?

Richard Parker:           Sure I'm happy to. I'll spare all the gory details but I guess my situation was probably very similar to a lot of other people. I was working at a job. I was actually doing quite well and was making a very nice living but the problem was twofold.

                                    Number one, I could never see a direct correlation between all of my hard work and the rewards that I was getting. And the second thing was I had managed through some level brilliance to lose $60,000 in the stock market in one year and that was the year that I made $100,000 in salary. So I didn't windup too far ahead and I really had dug myself into a hole financially and I didn't know how to get out. I was really, really concerned and realized that I really only had three ways to do that.

One would be wining the lotto and I don't buy lotto tickets so that was out of the question. The second was trying to beg, borrow, and steal money and go to Los Vegas and probably dumping it all on 17 black. And the third was I'd have to get out of being an employee. I'd have to make a shift from employee to employer and work for myself where there wasn't going to be any ceiling put on my earnings.

I decided to go into my own business and that was a time where our first child was on the way so I wasn't adding any additional pressure to myself, but I decided to get into my own business. That was in 1990 and out of the gate I was reasonably successful. Not overwhelmingly. It was a decent business. I was doing okay. It was in the consumer products business. I managed within probably 24 months to get back up to my original level of income but I learned very quickly that the way to grow that business or any other business was to potentially buy other businesses.

                                    I kept coming across these business owners in my work and travels that I recognized these were hardworking people but they weren't exactly sending men to the moon. They certainly weren't smarter than I was. They were working hard and doing a lot good things for their businesses, but they weren't geniuses and I became intrigued with that whole idea and started - I bought one small business that I thought could fit pretty well with the business that I already had and became very excited as that business began to grow. One thing led to another and before you know it I was buying a number of businesses. Over the course of the next number of years had acquired ten of them. And in that time what was happening was - I was pretty young then and I was getting - not that I'm old now, but you know, younger days and started getting a reputation where I was living which was Montréal at that point and now based in South Florida. Started getting I guess a bit of reputation for someone who could buy these small businesses and started getting calls from people to help them. That led to somewhat of a consulting business for perspective business buyers.

                                    Well in 1996 I sold one of my businesses to a large U.S. entertainment company for I guess what a lot of people would consider a lot of money and relocated with my family to South Florida. I had always wanted to live in the United States. I'm happy to report on January 23rd of this year I became an American Citizen which was one of the greatest days of my life and got involved in looking at businesses down here. One of them that I started looking at I became somewhat skeptical about this particular transaction. It was pretty substantial. It wasn't a monstrous business but it was pretty substantial. The purchase price was actually going to be little over a million dollars and I negotiated these incredible terms with the seller.

                                    What happened was as I dug into the business even though the attorneys and the accountants and the business brokers all told me it was wonderful something didn't sit right with me. I soon came to discover just based on my experience of what to look for that the whole business was basically a house of cards. It was almost to the point of being fraudulent and I decided to walk away from that transaction.

I remember standing outside the company's premises and thinking to myself, "You know, the average person would have bought that business." Only because of my experience with having bought nine others did I have the ability or the experience or the know how to recognize what to look for and decided to walk away from that particular transaction. But I became intrigued with the idea of, "What does the average person do who what's to buy a business," and started doing a tremendous amount of research and realized a couple of things.

                                    Number one, there's not a whole lot resources available to people that are looking to buy small businesses. And when I say small businesses I mean typically businesses under $10 million. The second thing was the infrastructure of the process itself didn't make sense in a lot of the way the business brokers worked or how people perceived the marketplace. It was really an inefficient market. And when you looked at what was available to people, books or what have you, they were either those type of books that were for Wharton Business School Graduates, or The Imbeciles Guide to Buying a Business which was clearly written by an imbecile.

                                    There was  no beginning to end guide that would take people by the hand, show them what they needed to do all along the way, and also assist them. And with the advent of the Internet at that point it was really still in its early days and I realized that there was perfect vehicle to provide that information on a grand scale. I had had a number of businesses up in Canada. The last one I had 220 employees and I decided that I'd never want to get into that type of environment again. The Internet was not only a perfect place to achieve this mass distribution but it would be a way through communicating with people via email or subsequently through phone calls to be able to help an enormous amount of people at one fell swoop. And took all my years and all of the hundreds of files related to transactions that I looked at, and I basically combined everything into this "how to guide" and it's been unbelievably successful but more than that is it's provided a vehicle for me to continue to do consulting and assisting business brokers in a little over 70 countries today. And probably have helped - based upon our last audit if you will, it's a little over 20,000 people helped them buy businesses. So it's been really, really exciting and very gratifying.